To be checked or hurried, would leave Mary Antony with the sense of an incomplete confession.
Therefore, with infinite patience the Prioress listened, seated in the sunlit garden, undisturbed, save for the silent passing, once or twice, of a veiled figure through the cloisters, who, seeing the Reverend Mother seated beneath the beech, did reverence and hastened on, looking not again.
When the garrulous old voice at last fell silent, the Prioress, with kind hand, covered the restless fingers--clasping and unclasping in anxious contortions--and firmly held them in folded stillness.
Her first words were of a thing as yet unmentioned.
"Dear Antony," she said, "is that thy posy lying at our feet ?" "Ah, Reverend Mother," sighed the old lay-sister, "in this did I again do wrong meaning to do right.

Sister Mary Augustine, coming into the kitchens with leave, from Mother Sub-Prioress, to make the pasties, and desiring to be free to make them heavy--unhampered by my advice which, of a surety, would have helped them to lightness--bade me go out and weed the garden.
"Weeding, I bethought me how much liefer I would be gathering a posy of choicest flowers for our sweet Lady's shrine; and, thus thinking, I began to do, not according to Sister Mary Augustine's hard task, but according to mine own heart's promptings.

Yet, when the posy was finished, alack-a-day! it was a posy of weeds!" Tears filled the eyes of the Prioress; at first she could not trust her voice to make reply.
Then, stooping she picked up the nosegay.
"Our Lady shall have it," she said.

"I will place it before her shrine, in mine own cell.

She will understand--knowing how often, though the hands perforce do weeding, yet, all the time, the heart is gathering choicest flowers.
"Aye, and sometimes when we bring to God offerings of fairest flowers, He sees but worthless weeds.